Alcohol Abuse and Tavern Reform in Late Colonial Mexico City

Abstract

S TUDIES on drinking customs and practices in a number of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American and European cities all underline the importance of alcoholic beverages and taverns in the lives of the poor. The works on the lower classes of London, Paris, and New York also document the social ills resulting from alcohol abuse, most notably, poverty, crime, family dissolution, and disease.' The study of alcohol use and abuse in colonial Mexico, however, has been severely hampered by the controversy engendered by proponents of the Black and White Legends. The simplistic Black Legend view of exploited and demoralized inebriated native peoples was based on standard, often published accounts of moralizing Spanish officials and clergy who essentially presented traditional Hispanic attitudes towards the Indians and their use of intoxicants. Almost a decade ago, one historian wrote that alcoholism remains one of the important relatively unstudied topics in Spanish colonial history, and called for a moratorium on unsubstantiated generalizations and for serious archival research.2 William B. Taylor has recently published the first major study on alcohol use in New Spain, although it concentrates primarily on the drinking habits and patterns in the countryside.3